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AM Class 3 – Week 2: Blocking

Hey everyone! This week I’m posting up my blocking of my assignment using the new Stan character from Animation Mentor! First off let me say this… the new AMP Pipeline and the new characters are awesome! I love the whole process of working in a more simulated studio environment, where my work is version controlled easily and I can just check the file out, work on it, save a new version and keep working. But, if something breaks or I don’t like where it is going, I can just revert back to a previous saved version. Oh, and the fact that is it all on the cloud is pretty epic, no longer need to worry about hard drive crashes losing all my work or anything. Also, these new rig’s are so great! I did not want to stop animating this week, I was having so much fun posing out Stan and working with him. The new features with IK/FK snapping and space switching made my life so much easier this time around when dealing with having to use constraints and a prop! Big thanks to the riggers and modelers that developed these characters, I seriously haven’t had this much fun posing a character in a while!

Anyways, this is week 2 of the 3 week assignment. Next week’s update will be the splined out and “polished” version of the shot. After that, we moved\ right into starting on our short sequence collaboratively as a class! Thankfully this shot was a quick 96 frame shot, which really made me focus on getting to the meat and potatoes of the shot quickly. This was something my mentor Steve Cady from Class 2 always emphasized. He said it is often that you have to just GET TO THE ACTION. It is pretty rare to get a long enough shot where you can really do all sorts of pretty anticipations and build up so learning to get to the main idea of the shot, clearly and keeping it appealing is very important.

The biggest note I kept in my mind while blocking this assignment was what my mentor Mike told me during my critique earlier in the week. He said he really wanted us to try and push our poses since we have such simple characters to work with. We should go for very broad actions and poses because it is hard to do that when you get more complex characters so we should take advantage of these more simple characters to show off our body mechanics. I went back and looked at some of my comic books to reference the Hulk and watched some clips of gorillas on youtube to get that feeling of a big heavy beast-like character. I tried to get the idea of weight to come across in my poses as clearly as possible, and build more overlap into the poses as well. Anyways, that is pretty much all for this week. Keep checking back, as I will be making plenty of posts about all the new things to come with Class 3.